This winter Sunday, I woke to the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel, my da sharpening my bread knife because “it wouldn’t cut butter.” I stayed in bed, allowing the long metallic strokes on each side of the blade to carry me back to the kitchen of my childhood, my father making sure the knife was sharp enough to carve the Sunday roast or the Christmas turkey. Like changing a tire or wiring a plug, it is something he has always thought I should know how to do.

Regarding the honing of the bread-knife,  he says I need only exert the same pressure on each side of it and then  carefully test its sharpness on the inside of my thumb. I have tried – admittedly driven more by nostalgia than necessity – but I  have never been able to get the sound right. My mother can’t do it either, nor has she ever tried. Without my father, I suspect the knives in her kitchen would be as dull as mine.

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Packing clothes for the journey from Belfast to Dublin and on to chilly Chicago and on to my little house all empty and shimmering in Arizona sunshine, I noticed my boots were still caked with mud, presumably from that walk at dusk through the wet leaves and muck of Heaney’s Broagh. I handed my boots to my father and asked would he take them outside to shake off the dirt. In that instant, I knew – and I was ashamed – that when those boots were back in my hands, they would be polished to a high shine.

Twenty-five days later, it is an indelible image in my mind –  my father, formerly strong as an ox and stoic, is alone and crying, his head in his hands, overwhelmed and undone by feelings of inadequacy and helplessness. All he could do in that spot of time was polish my shoes, the way he had done so many times when I was a child.

My heart broke for him.

Sitting on the stairs in my parent’s house in Castledawson, the boots gleaming in my hands, lines long memorized from Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” filled my head:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.
...
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

In these early, endless days of whichever stage of grief the experts have placed me, I hope I am not speaking indifferently – as I have done in the past – to these parents of mine as they fumble in vain for the right way to comfort their newly widowed daughter; for the right way to approach their only granddaughter’s 16^th birthday and make it impossibly less sad as another “first” milestone without her dad. I can’t contemplate Christmas and New Year’s Eve. How can it be only a year since we set off fireworks at the end of Montebello Avenue, giddy and full of good cheer for 2013?

Today, I feel like a barn sparrow in a nest. In spite of years of practice and watching others do it so effortlessly, I cannot remember how to fly. The timing’s off. Twenty-five days ago, the clocks all stopped. Some of those days, it was impossible to speak. It was easier to set words down on a page even though none of them was right. I would type a word or a phrase. Then I would delete it.

Of all the millions of words available to me, not one is adequate.

For my birthday several years ago, my husband – my late husband – bought a beautiful fountain pen. I had told him I wanted to resume the practice of writing in a diary each evening, and I wanted a good pen that was up to the task. With a nod to my teachers at Antrim Grammar School who only accepted work written in ink, I would use a fountain pen. I remember he looked at me over the tops of his glasses and asked me if I thought I was Bridget Jones.  Oh, Ken, you would love the irony. Mark Darcy is dead, and Bridget is a widow. And, she’s 51. Seriously.

While I did not use the pen as much as I had hoped, it is always within reach. When breast cancer barged in two Novembers ago, along with it came a compulsion to write – but not with the pen. Thanks to a night class taken at Antrim Tech in 1980, I am a speedy typist. I still find something magical about watching words appear as a result of whatever I tap on a keyboard.  

Ken loved that I was writing again – typing on my computer – even though it meant I retreated into myself for hours at a time and half the time, I never found the right words anyway.  I suppose I was trying to do what Seamus Heaney talks about in “Personal Helicon” – trying to “see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” To see myself; to turn inward and then outward again as a woman changed again.

If we knew when these changes were coming – the unwanted milestones in the middle of lives being lived –  would we do things differently to help soften the blow? Would we remember to say thank you to a father for sharpening knives or polishing shoes or making sure there was enough air in the tires? To a husband for making sure his wife takes her cancer medicine at the same time every night? Would we? 

I am the family photographer, the historian, the collector and curator of the documentation of our lives – love notes, scrapbooks, concert tickets, handmade birthday cards, photographs; letters to and from Zoe, a Tooth Fairy that lived in the mesquite tree in our back yard along with her pixie pals, “good” lists from Santa Claus, cards from the Easter Bunny, and other figures that feature prominently in a little girl’s life; postcards from far away places, my mother’s recipes, newspaper clippings about people we know in Antrim or Derry, and handwritten airmail letters from home.

In 2011, my daughter and I made a Father’s Day scrapbook for my husband. I chose the photographs, and she was in charge of the writing which included thirteen things she loved about him, one of which was this:

“Every year of my life, your steady hand has lit the candles on my birthday cake. Thirteen wishes … shhh.”

With his steady hand, he would light the candles on only two more birthday cakes. And our steady smiling girl, just fifteen Christmases of age, would make reasonable wishes.

It never occurred to me that anyone else would light the candles on her birthday cake, or teach her to drive, or pick her up after school the way he did every single day for ten years, or hold her hand when she got cold in the frozen food aisle of the grocery store, or tell her to bring only the stale bread to the park to feed the ducks and incur the ire of two angry geese they had christened “Fight and Bite.”

The empty chair at the table, the first Christmas card to my husband and me from someone who doesn’t know yet that he is dead, the first tree ornament we bought in 1990.

Yet still I move through the house hoping to find him. Every room is full of evidence of his life – his laundry still folded on top of the washing machine, bills opened with reminders on post-it notes to pay them, unread sections of the Sunday paper on the coffee table.  I noticed that he had refilled the prescription for my cancer medication so I wouldn’t have to miss a day. He had recorded The Daily Show so I wouldn’t miss an episode. There was a note to remind the landscaper to plant my favorite annuals.

Oh, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?  

 

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